Prior to the Syracuse-Colgate football game, I spent about an hour wandering around the Syracuse campus. My walk was partially an emotion-laden stroll down memory lane and partially a photo safari. Some of the landmarks I captured on camera are places filled with a great deal of personal significance to me, going back to my stints as a student and then a part-time faculty member at the university. Some of them I just found photogenic. All of them are parts of a beautiful campus. Architecturally, Syracuse University is almost a platonic ideal of a northeastern American university. Moving about the place on a sunny early-September afternoon was like stepping inside a glossy college brochure.
Hall of Languages. This is the university’s signature building. Some say it was the inspiration for the Addams Family house. That may or may not be true, but Hall of Languages can definitely look like a spooky haunted mansion on a gloomy Syracuse day.A monument to the Syracuse University students lost on Pan Am Flight 103, which was destroyed in-flight over Scotland by a terrorist bomb in 1988. Thirty-five of the victims were Syracuse students heading home after a semester abroad. I knew two of them.College Place.The ivy-covered walls of academia.Crouse College — possibly the most majestic building on campus.Honest Abe sitting outside the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Lincoln had no special connection to the City of Syracuse or Central New York that I am aware of, and he was assassinated five years before Syracuse was founded as a university, but it’s a striking statue, in any case.Carnegie Library.Sadler Hall (the wide one) and Lawrinson Hall (the tall one) viewed from the Dome. The College of Law is located in the building on the right.There are a number of different versions of Otto the Orange, which vary widely in terms of cutesiness, plushiness, roundness, and ferocity. This incarnation is not my favorite. The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. I earned a Master’s degree from Newhouse in 1995 and taught Advertising Research here in 2019.“Knowledge crowns those who seek her.“
Researcher. Marketer. Teacher. Father of adult children and dogs. 20th Century holdover. Central New York native. Long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan. History nerd. Traveler. Vintage advertising enthusiast. Hat wearer.
a.k.a. V.J. 
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